Business News

Every once in a while I mention the "small companies banding together to survive in a hostile environment" strategy, and here's a perfect example. Aspen Comics, the long running company founded by the late Michael Turner, has acquired Big Dog Ink as an imprint. Both Aspen and Big Dog publish primarily periodicals, and that really is a tough business plan these days unless you have well known IP, and even then it is no cakewalk.

Things are changing rapidly in comics retailing, and as we mentioned previously, this year's ICv2 conference which will be held the day before New York...

We here at The Beat have long been a fan of Tim Beyer's analysis of comics and comics-based entertainment trends at The Motley Fool and he's just launched his own site to expand on that called The Full Bleed:

ICv2 will once again hold a conference the day before New York Comic-Con officially kicks off, on Wednesday, October 8th. This year's conference has...

ICv2 has a new report on the size of a market, this time the hobby game market—games like Magic, Warhammer,various card capture games, D&D...

Wizard World just released its Q2 SEC filings, reporting income up sharply on an increased slate of shows. You'll recall that Wizard World is...

Is consolidation still cool? A number of big deals have collapsed in recent days, whether it's just the dog days of summer or something...

As just reported, the NY Times delivered a pretty strong diss to the economics of Comic-Con, and I'm sure con vets and observers will...

Veteran NY Times entertainment business writers Michael Cieply and Brooks Barnes have perhaps put the final curse on a year in which SDCC got a little bit smaller, by reviving claims that con-goers are low rent consumers unworthy of high end sponsorships:

I heard about the Rupert Murdoch putting in a bid for Tim Warner a little while ago and thought it was too astounding to...

Milton Griepp has run his annual analysis of digital comics sales and the numbers are up again. He reports that digital was at...

You probably heard that DC has revamped their royalties program, adding colorists to the payout mix and lumping digital in with print.  We should...